Joffrey Ballet ensemble in Alexander Ekman’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”/Photo: Cheryl Mann

It has been six years since the Joffrey Ballet staged Alexander Ekman’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I was curious to observe my own response to a second viewing, spaced out by a half-decade of life and a lifetime’s worth of global and cultural tumult. The two-act ballet, April 25-May 5 at the Lyric, is a fevered take on the summer solstice celebrations of Ekman’s native Sweden and—don’t let the flower crowns and flowing tresses on the marketing materials confuse you—has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s comedy. But it does contain plentiful humor, fairy-like song and an absence of human heads where one expects them. I remembered watching “Midsummer” being like eating cake for dinner: a naughty treat that left me feeling a bit undernourished when all was said and done.

Since the “Midsummer” premiere, The Joffrey has moved from the Auditorium Theatre to the Lyric Opera House  and now has an even more opulent lobby to set the tone for a sumptuous, tippling evening of overindulgence. String lights hang above a string quartet which plays amidst a thick twittering of birdsong. Small piles of hay in corners allude to the unforgettable opening scene (as spectacular as I remembered), which elicited a burst of applause as the curtain lifted. The Lyric feels like it was built for this show, with its soaring laurel leaf wainscoting and massive stage, extended for “Midsummer” over the orchestra pit, right up to the front-row seats.
Situated spitting distance from the front row is a bed, occupied by a slumbering Dylan Gutierrez, seemingly undisturbed by chirping birds or patrons taking their seats. Behind him, flirtatious phrases in cursive project onto the red velvet curtain. A clock on the supertitles screen lets us know this is the near future: the morning of June 20, 2024. The lights go down and Gutierrez attempts to ignore the sound of a digital alarm clock but is roused—just as Temur Suluashvili was six years ago—by Victoria Jaiani, who helps him quickly dress and join nearly fifty dancers revealed by the rising curtain, all threshing and tossing fountains of hay to Mikael Karlsson’s stunning score which is played onstage by members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra. The whooshing of hay joins the percussion section, each flying strand vivid against a deep black backdrop. A cluster of floodlights depicting the rising sun shines down on lustily joyous young men and women in light-colored, loose-fitting cotton trousers, shirts and dresses.

So begins a two-hour romp through daytime debauchery and late-night delirium. Act one is the party: dancing around the maypole, a barbeque interrupted by a cloudburst, day drinking commencing respectably around 1pm, a seemingly endless conversation with that person you just can’t extract yourself from—in this case, the audience. Yeah, we know—the shutter-happy guy snapping photos the whole time. The revelry unravels by dinnertime. As the clock pushes past midnight, pants go missing and guests grab candelabras from the dinner table, pouring in drunken slow-motion off the stage and up the aisles as Gutierrez returns to bed.

Act two is the dream. Ekman stages a rave nightmare of twisted images from act one, throwing in extra weirdness just for fun. Surreal to the hilt and stuffed with the subconscious’ greatest hits (falling from a great height, finding oneself naked in front of a crowd, gibberish talk), Ekman’s dream is bountifully populated with clever visual references and puns. I remembered a dance-joke fish bit but forgot about the unsettling use of life-sized dolls. Swedish singer Anna von Hausswolff, who graced the party with song in the first half, haunts the second, employing her breathtaking range with banshee power. Time comes untethered (how long do epic dreams last in reality?)—the clock spins through hours, days, months and, by the time Gutierrez is back in the sack, lands at summer solstice 2025. Was it all a dream? The day? The year? The last six years?

Exiting the dreamspace of the theater, I found I felt very much the same about Ekman’s “Midsummer” as I did in 2018. It’s a spectacular piece of entertainment on a Broadway scale. It’s funny and pleasurably weird. Sight gags abound, a warehouse worth of props and mobile setpieces are used to great effect. And I still feel some of the finest living dancers wind up upstaged by the window dressing. There’s great dance here—an endearing pas de deux between Jeraldine Mendoza and José Pablo Castro Cuevas in act one, a time-stopping sequence for three couples in act two, the partnering of Gutierrez and Jaiani, and more—but these aren’t the parts that stick with you. It’s the flying hay and headless suits. But again, maybe that doesn’t matter. Sometimes you just want cake for dinner.

Joffrey Ballet’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Lyric Opera House, 20 North Upper Wacker Drive. April 25-May 5. Tickets (from $36) at joffrey.org.